The New World

[The following is Episode 9 of my 16-part documentary series entitled Larger than Life, about the role that beliefs play in shaping the events of our civilization.  This particular episode is inspired by, and draws much of its source material from, Ronald Sanders' book: Lost Tribes and Promised Lands.]

Late in the twelfth century, some twenty years after France and Germany had led a violent crusade against their Moslem enemies that ended in disaster for the Christian forces, a strange letter appeared from a distant kingdom which offered renewed hope for the embattled Christians of Europe. Its author called himself “king of kings and lord of lords,” saying that he ruled over many kings and noblemen, and over a million soldiers, who marched with enormous crosses of gold as their standards.  He said that he lived in a magnificent palace, made of ebony, gold, and crystal, and ate in the company of his nobles at a large emerald table.  There was no poverty, greed, theft or deceit in his realm, Christian pilgrims were welcome there, and they could even find miraculous cures for their ailments.  And though his kingdom was in the middle of a desert, a magnificent river flowed through it, in which gold and precious jewels could be found.  On the far side of this river was an even more remarkable spectacle, the lost ten tribes of Israel, who were under the protection of this king, and paid tribute to him.   And like Israel, the kingdom of this remarkable man was a land of milk and honey, a land that spanned the ancient kingdoms of Babylon and Persia, and even had one of the rivers of Eden in its midst.  It was indeed an earthly paradise, but a powerful one, whose people were able to withstand any threat to the cross of Christ.  And yet, in spite of his great power, this king of kings, and lord of lords, who reigned there emulated the humble and chaste life of Christ himself, preferring a humble title for himself, wishing simply to be called the Presbyter, the priest.  For the weary, embattled Christians of Europe, his letter offered a new hope, that in some distant land, under a great but humble king, a Christian nation could exist unchallenged by any threat from without or from within.  And in the centuries that followed, the quest for this great king, this Prester John, and the land over which he reigned, would capture the hearts and minds of many adventurous spirits who longed to find a place of rest, hope, security, and wealth, a place unlike any that existed in the known regions, far removed from the familiar routes of trade and conquest, a place that truly could be called a “New World”.

During the three hundred years after the appearance of Prester John’s letter, the peoples of Europe lived through events that would change their land forever, events that were profound, sometimes calamitous, and occasionally even catastrophic.  By the year 1300, the population had outgrown the food supply, making famine a common occurrence, and in the century that followed, the Black Plague killed at least a fourth, and possibly nearly half, of the people.  But in the aftermath of this disaster, wages increased, as there were fewer workers available, peasants revolted against repressive conditions and institutions, serfdom began to disappear, and within two centuries of the Plague, higher standards of living paved the way for a population explosion.  Law and order had broken down during this time:  The so-called Holy Roman Empire, which had ruled Germany and Italy, began to lose its grip over these nations when local leaders challenged its authority.  And England and France entered into a violent struggle with each other, known as the Hundred Years war, which descended into chaos as soldiers from each side pillaged the lands of the others, and administrators of cities and towns left their governments untended to go off and fight in the war.  But this war also left to posterity heroes that were, or have become, larger than life, like England’s King Henry V, whose army defeated a much larger French force at the battle of Agincourt, and France’s Joan of Arc, the illiterate peasant girl who rallied her country’s armies onto several victories.  Joan of Arc claimed to be inspired by the voices of saints, and while these claims eventually won the allegiance of French armies, it would also lead to her execution at the hands of English enemies, who tried her for heresy and witchcraft, and burned her at the stake.

Prosecution of heresy and witchcraft, as we saw in the last episode, was the final resort of leaders of the Christian church in their efforts to maintain a grip on the spiritual lives of Europeans.  Christianity, with its message of faith, hope, love, and universal brotherhood, had tamed the brutal excesses of the Roman Empire, and had provided a unifying and consoling presence for the peoples of Europe when that Empire began to crumble.  But the growing power of the Church leadership, and the Church’s general intolerance toward other faiths or doctrines, resulted in violent conflicts with perceived external enemies such as the growing empire of Islam, and militant persecution of internal dissenters.  Nevertheless, the power of the Church was undermined as corruption within the institution became increasingly conspicuous.  High offices, such as the bishopric, were being purchased outright, and ecclesiastical decisions were clearly being influenced by money, connections, or politics.  Even the office of the papacy was not above scandal.  When Clement V, a French pope, chose to remain in his own homeland rather than reside in Rome, the high office remained in that country for nearly 70 years, from 1309 to 1377, and those who occupied it appeared to show special favor to the interests of the French and their king.  From 1377 to 1417, there were two, and later three popes, and each had his own backers among the different kings of Europe.  And although only one person would hold the supreme seat of church power after 1417, this would not end the scandal that would continue to be associated with it.  Popes and other high church officials were reputed to live lives of opulence and luxury, and even tales of sexual misconduct were not uncommon.  In 1492, a year that we will return to shortly for other reasons, Rodrigo Borgia bribed his way into the office of the papacy, and, as Pope Alexander VI, used his ecclesiastical powers to plunder the wealth of noblemen and rivals, and enrich the lives of his children, including his infamous son, Cesare Borgia.  Within the next thirty years, Martin Luther and other religious dissenters would usher in an age of radical religious reform, creating religious sects and movements that would openly break with Catholicism, and that would in turn prompt the Catholic Church to undergo reform from within.  But while the rise of Protestantism contributed to a renewed and reinvigorated Christianity, and gave new avenues of religious expression for those who desired it, this monumental change to European life brought in its wake catastrophes and crises of a new kind.  Europe became engulfed in devastating wars of religion that not only pitted nations against one another, but also tore them apart from within, engulfing them in bloody civil wars.  Protestant subjects were victims of repression, persecution, and even massacres in countries dominated by Catholic rulers, just as Catholics were in Protestant-ruled lands.  Even worse, a religion that enjoyed royal protection in a country at one particular time might find its members outcasts virtually overnight, as a monarch of one faith was succeeded by that of another. 

It is no wonder, then, that the eyes of many Europeans began to search the horizon for some new land, some better place to live, free from the violence and chaos of their familiar world.  But in the centuries prior to the great wars of religion, that horizon was a very limited, and a very mysterious one.  In 1381, when one of two popes was still residing in France, and France itself was engaged in that bloody One Hundred Years war with England, a map of the known world was presented as a coronation gift to the new French King, Charles VI.  This map of the world consisted of Europe, Asia, and North Africa, and at its outer fringes were islands of ambiguous identity.  The Americas, of course, were absent, as was Africa south of the Sahara desert.  But the map is illustrated with tantalizing pictures of exotic animals, such as giraffes, elephants, and unusual birds, and foreign peoples as well.  Among the tiny portraits of elegantly dressed figures on the map, wearing turbans, crowns, and veils, two black kings appear.  One is located in West Africa, and is named Munsa Mali, “lord of the Negroes of Guinea”.  The other is placed on an island called Trapobana, near Asia, described as “the last island of the Indies”, where, we are told, black giants exist who eat white strangers that happen to wander into their domain.  An inscription on the map describes “islands, containing marvelous riches . . . gold and silver, spices and precious stones”.  There are, of course, religious references as well – in a land called Tarsia appear the figures of the Three Wise Men, in Arabia, the Queen of Sheba, and in the far northeast, a wall is depicted enclosing the peoples of Gog and Magog – mentioned in the New Testament book of Revelation – along with a figure of the Antichrist.  References to this wall may have been inspired by a dim awareness of the Great Wall of China.  It was, after all, less than one hundred years before this map was made that Marco Polo brought to his fellow Europeans the first extensive knowledge of China and other Asian countries.  The son of an Italian merchant, Marco Polo traveled with his father and uncle to the Far East in the late thirteenth century, and eventually entered into the service of Kublai Khan, emperor of China and grandson of the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan.  He lived in the empire of Kublai Khan for seventeen years, traveling extensively throughout China as an agent of the emperor, and after his return to Italy, he dictated tales of his travels and adventures to a well-known writer of the age.  At first, these stories were regarded by his fellow countrymen as too fantastic to believe, but in the years that followed, as other travelers verified many of the details in his accounts, they began to stimulate a new interest in exploration and trade with the Far East.  The atlas presented to Charles VI, with its intriguing illustrations, and hints of fabulous and near mythical regions at its fringes, reflected a growing consciousness that there was a world beyond the familiar one, and a fascination with what might lie in these unfamiliar territories.  And a quote from the book of Isaiah that appears on an unknown ocean seems to suggest a divine call to find refuge in this new world: “I will send those that escape of them unto the nations in the seas, into Africa and to Lydia.  And to the islands far off, that have not heard of me and have not seen my glory; and they will announce my glory to the nations.”

Although this remarkable map had been a gift to the French, it would be in Spain that the great age of exploration would begin.  In many ways, it was only natural that it would fall upon Spain to lead the way into a new world.  In its own history, it had been host to probably the most diverse collections of peoples and faiths of any other nation in Europe, and in its better moments, it had been a benevolent host, providing an example of how peoples of different faiths and backgrounds could live together in a spirit of toleration and harmony.  During the waning years of the Roman Empire, Spain had been dominated by a Germanic tribe, the Visigoths, but in the early eight century most of it was invaded and conquered by the Moors, who were followers of the religion of Islam.  In the centuries that followed, Islamic rule made Spanish civilization the most advanced of any in Europe.  Education was made widely accessible to rich and poor alike, great universities came into being, and art and literature flourished.  But in the northern region of the Spanish peninsula, there had always been a remnant that had never succumbed to the Moors, and this remnant steadily grew in power, seizing larger and larger sections of territory, and driving out the Moslems in their wake.  By the beginning of the eleventh century, this “Reconquista”, as it came to be called, was well under way, producing legendary warriors reminiscent of the knights of King Arthur, such as the Castilian warlord El Cid, who actually fought for both sides at different times in his colorful career.  After two hundred years of relentless and persistent assaults from the north, the power of the Moors was limited to some holdings in the far southern tip of the peninsula.  From this reconquered territory emerged new Christian-dominated kingdoms: Portugal, Castile and Leon, and Aragon.  For a time, it seemed that the open and diverse society fostered by the Moors would continue: Christians, Moors, and Jews lived together in a relatively harmonious existence, and benefited from this co-existence through the free exchange of ideas, both scientific and spiritual.  But by the 1300’s the general spirit of toleration began to fade, and life became much more unpleasant for those who were not Christians.  Jewish communities became targets of violent attacks.  It has been estimated that up to sixty percent of the Jews in Spain converted to Christianity around this time, and while some of these conversions may have been voluntary, many were brought about by threats and violence.  A new class of Christians emerged in Spain – the Conversos – Jewish converts, and in decades to come they would play a significant role in Spain’s age of exploration.  1492, that year that we’ve come to link with the New World, was a watershed year for Spain for other reasons as well.  In 1492, Granada, the only remaining kingdom in the Spanish peninsula still under Moslem rule, was captured by Castile.  Castile’s queen, Isabella, had married King Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469, and with Granada now under her control, the road was paved for the eventual unification of Spain.  Queen Isabella was a zealous Catholic, and a fervent supporter of the Spanish Inquisition.  The united kingdoms now jointly controlled by Isabella and her husband Ferdinand comprised a new world power, greater, they hoped, than any that the Moors had ever ruled.  But this new world power would be a Christian one, and for them, there was no place in it for Jews.  In 1492, they issued a proclamation.  All of the Jews of Spain would have four months to either become Christians, or leave the country, forever.

We remember 1492, of course, for yet another reason - as the year that a man named Christopher Columbus approached King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella with a strange proposition – to find an alternative route to the lucrative trading markets of Asia, westward, across the ocean, rather than the traditional eastward route through dangerous and often hostile territories.  The story of Christopher Columbus and his discovery of the New World has become a true modern legend, and as with all legends, truth is embellished with a little fiction.  He was, as most everybody knows today, not the first European to set foot in America: the Vikings had been there 500 years earlier, and Portuguese and English boats may have fished the waters off of Newfoundland and Labrador as recently as the 1300’s.  And we are told that he argued passionately to skeptical audiences that the world is round, rather than flat, but most of the intelligent people of that day believed this already.  What he did convince Queen Isabella and her husband was that a westward journey across the Atlantic Ocean to Asia would not require an unreasonably long voyage.  But Columbus, relying upon calculations of the earth’s circumference made by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy 1300 years earlier, underestimated its size.  The irony is that if he’d used an even older calculation made by the Greek geographer Eratosthenes 400 years before Ptolemy, he would have had a very accurate estimate of the westward distance to Asia.  And because he also relied upon the geography of Marco Polo, who mistakenly put Japan 1,500 miles east of China, nearly three times the actual distance, his error was compounded.  Had it not been for the happy accident that there was a large landmass between Europe and Asia in the west, Columbus’s crew would have mutinied, or starved to death, for certain.

                                                                       Christopher Columbus

Who was Christopher Columbus, and what was it that inspired him to seek out a westward route to Asia?  History tells us that he was of Italian birth, born in Genoa, and that he probably had little formal education.  But he was drawn to the sea at a very early age, and by the age of thirty had traveled to England, Ireland, and, by his own account, Iceland.  He seems to have developed a fascination for religious mysticism, and this, when combined with his intense interest in geography, produced a very unusual passion for exploration.  He kept a personal “Book of Prophecies”, mainly filled with quotations from the Bible, and many of these dealt with “isles far off”.  One of the books of Esdras, an apocryphal work of the Old Testament, had a special place of importance for him.  The book has much to say about the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and reference to a “man that came out of the sea” who encountered, and conquered, a multitude of men.  This “man from the sea”, according to Esdras, is “he whom God the highest hath kept a great season, which by his own self shall deliver his creature,” where “creature” is an apparent reference to the Messiah.  Another book in his possession, a work of geography called Imago Mundi, argues for the existence of a short western route to the Indies across the sea, and hints that somewhere, in the islands to the west, exists a terrestrial paradise, perhaps the original Garden of Eden itself.  It seems that Columbus was piecing together a personal destiny for himself, something in which he would play a role, not merely as an explorer, but as an agent of the Divine.  Like Joan of Arc, he believed that his great mission in life would bring glory not only to his people, but would serve the designs of the Creator, himself.

But it would take him eight years to convince an earthly ruler of the importance of his mission.  His plan was rejected by the King of Portugal in 1484, and it would only be after a persistent effort of seven years in Spain that he would convince Queen Isabella to endorse it.  In August of 1492, he set out with his now famous three ships, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, and, after two months of sailing, encountered land, and a friendly population, which he called indios, believing that they were natives of an island in the East Indies.  A few days later, the expedition landed at Cuba, where Columbus sent a delegation to find the court of Marco Polo’s Mongol emperor of China.  In December of that year, the Santa Maria was shipwrecked off the island of Hispaniola, and since this, too, seemed to be populated with friendly natives, 39 men were planted there to form a settlement, which was named Navidad.  Columbus returned to Spain on the Nina, bringing with him artifacts, animals, natives, and gold.  Ferdinand and Isabella welcomed him personally and treated his return as a triumphal one, and the specimens which he had brought back produced a sensation at their court.  The gold, of course, did not escape notice either.  In an account of his travels that he wrote upon this first return, he spoke of the natives in glowing terms: “They manifest great love towards all in preference to themselves,” he said, and added, “They practice no kind of idolatry, but have a firm belief that all strength and power, and indeed all things, are in heaven, and that I had descended from there with these ships and sailors, and it was under this impression that I was received after they had cast aside their fears.”  But this vision of the noble savage would soon be shattered.  In 1493, Columbus returned to the new world, now at the head of 17 ships and nearly 1,500 men.  When he reached the settlement of Navidad, he found that it had been destroyed, and all of the Spaniards he had left behind, killed.  A new, larger colony was established on the island, and after 5 months of further exploration along the coasts of Cuba and Jamaica, Columbus returned to govern it himself.  But he proved to be much less gifted as an administrator than he was as an explorer.  This colony, renamed Santo Domingo, would survive, but not without a cost to his reputation.  When he returned to Spain in 1496, complaints about his leadership would follow him there.  He had still not found a passage to Asia, and had not even brought back much of the gold which had held out such promise of a material reward for these adventures.  For Ferdinand and Isabella, the enterprise was beginning to appear much less lucrative, and their hero less impressive.  It would take two years before he could make another voyage to the Americas, and this time he was given only six ships.  On this third voyage, Columbus discovered the continent of South America, but what should have been the crowning achievement of his career ended in personal disaster.  Upon arriving at the colony of Santo Domingo in Hispaniola, which he had left under the leadership of his two brothers, he found it in open revolt.  A royal commissioner had been sent from Spain to investigate the disturbance, and by his command the three Columbus brothers were sent back to Spain in shackles.  Although he would be freed upon his return, and given permission to embark on a fourth voyage, Columbus would find no more glory in his discoveries.  This last one would end in shipwreck, and a year of being marooned on the island of Jamaica.  He would live for less than two years after his rescue in 1504, his personal legend having become a delusion – for he insisted to his dying day that he had in fact reached the continent of Asia, never realizing that he had stumbled upon an entirely new continent.

The discoveries of Columbus would produce, in their wake, the dawning of a new age of exploration, colonization, and conquest.  In 1519, the Portuguese sailor Ferdinand Magellan would begin a voyage that would culminate in the circling of the globe, and in the process, he would encounter the great ocean dividing Asia and the Americas, naming it the Pacific, because of its relative calm.  Portugal was Spain’s principal rival in this new great enterprise of discovery, prompting Pope Alexander VI to divide the New World between them, drawing an imaginary line from north to south through the Atlantic, and bequeathing everything west of it to the Spanish, and everything east of it to the Portuguese.  In a few short decades, Central and South America would yield its secrets, and its treasures, to the bold, the adventurous, the curious, and the greedy.   Ponce de Leon, who had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, set out in 1512 to search for a fabled Fountain of Youth, having been told by natives in the Caribbean that he would find it on an island of Bimini.  His search would bring him an untimely death by an Indian’s arrow, but not before he discovered the land of Florida.  Vasco de Balboa, the son of a poor nobleman, would fail as a farmer in the New World, but while fleeing from creditors, led an expedition across the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and saw the shores of the Pacific Ocean, seven years before Magellan’s ships sailed it.  In 1519, Hernando Cortez began his conquest of Mexico and the great Indian confederation of the Aztecs, and in 1533 Francisco Pizarro brought down the power of the Inca Empire in Peru.  These are the great discoveries and conquests that are handed down to us in the history books, and as we read them, we’re left with a mixed sense of admiration for the courage of the explorers, but also horror and even revulsion at the treachery and cruelty of the conquistadors.  But the natives of the New World were victims of other, more pernicious assaults.  The Europeans who settled in their lands brought diseases, never before encountered by the inhabitants, such as smallpox, that decimated entire populations.  And the Spanish brought a social system that had served them well in the Reconquista, called encomienda.  In Spain, lands taken back from the Moorish infidels were given as rewards to conquering soldiers and colonists for their services, and any unfortunate inhabitants who still lived on them were put under the control of the new overlords, and were expected to work the land for them, as serfs.  The encomendero, as the new owner was called, was bound by certain codes of chivalrous conduct toward his underlings, and was expected to instruct them in the ways of a proper Christian life.  But while this system had been relatively humane in the Old World, in the New World it soon broke down, as colonists found it more profitable to have their native subjects working in gold mines rather than tending farms.  The work was arduous, the hours long, and greed, along with remoteness from civilized society, soon turned the encomenderos into brutal taskmasters who had little regard for the well-being of their laborers.  The natives had become virtual slaves in their own lands, and those that did not die from disease, rarely survived long in the mines.  The native populations of Hispaniola and Cuba dwindled to near extinction, and more than half of Peru’s inhabitants died in the mines, all victims of famine, disease, and overwork.  Desperate for a steady supply of labor, colonists now resorted to outright slave-raiding, kidnapping peoples from neighboring islands and transplanting them to the mines.  And when these were not enough, the owners turned to a new source of forced human labor, Africa.

Native American and African Slaves Working a Sugar Plantation on Hispaniola

There were critics of this system, such as Bartolome’ de Las Casas.  In A Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies, he provided a damning account of its abuses, with graphic details of the sufferings of the natives at the hands of his countrymen, made more credible since its author was a Catholic bishop.  And the bishop spared no criticism of the clergy.  Describing a Cuban Indian, about to be burned at the stake, who is receiving a final sermon from a Franciscan friar on the promise of Heaven to those who repent, Las Casas wrote that after some reflection the native asked if all Christians go to Heaven.  When the friar said yes, the Indian replied, without hesitation, “that he would rather go to Hell than have to be among such a cruel people.”  “This is the fame and honor,” concludes Las Casas, “that God and our faith have won by means of the Christians who have gone to the Indies.”  The agitation of Las Casas and others would prompt the monarchy to abolish the encomienda in 1542, and his book would become a sensation in Europe.  But it would not meet with approval by all of his countrymen, or even his fellow clergymen.  Eventually, it would be banned by the Inquisition.

Many of the Christian missionaries, of course, who came to the New World were motivated by a genuine desire to bring civilization and a higher spirituality to the Indians.  The first explorers and colonists, after all, had encountered tribes that practiced violence, cannibalism, torture, and other behaviors that to them were evidence of spiritual decadence.  Just as the early Christians had tamed the brutal excesses of the Roman Empire, and later had converted the German barbarians who brought down that Empire from violent warlords to knights and nobles, so these latter day missionaries hoped that they could bring a civilizing and enlightening influence to the natives of America.  In many Indian tribes they saw what they thought, or hoped, was already the beginnings of a belief in a single, moral God.  The legend of Prester John might have inspired some Christians to conclude that these peoples had already encountered the message of Christ, and only now dimly remembered or understood it.  Other Christians believed that the fabled Lost Ten Tribes of Israel had somehow made their way to the New World, and their descendants survived among the Indians.  But in a Europe that now faced a divided Church, and was succumbing to wars of religion, members of persecuted religious sects also looked to America as a refuge, as a type of New Jerusalem where they could find freedom to worship as they believed.  For Puritans, Quakers, Jews, and even Jews who had become Christians, America offered the hope of a refuge from the intolerance and harassment that they faced among their countrymen in Europe.  And for many, if not most, of both the missionaries and the refugees, the desire that they harbored was to bring with them an enlightening message of spiritual peace, which they would share with the natives either by example or by exhortation.

During the height of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial experience, the peoples of northern Europe watched with horror and indignation at the abuses of the natives, and many must have wondered what could have gone so terribly wrong.  But the indignation was mixed with jealousy, for it was plain that Spain had profited handsomely from its adventures overseas.  It would not take long before Spain’s rivals would stake their own claims in the New World.  England established its first permanent settlement, Jamestown, in Virginia in 1607.  And in the stories that still survive today from the English settlers’ earliest encounters with the Indians, of the pilgrims getting through their first harsh winter with the help of the natives, and of Captain John Smith of Jamestown being saved from execution by the Indian princess Pocahontas, we see the optimism of the English that their experience would be less brutal, less confrontational, and more civilized than that of the Spaniards in America.  But as the English colonies began to grow and multiply at an increasing rate, relations with the Indians turned sour very quickly.  Even Captain John Smith, in the aftermath of an Indian massacre of some fellow colonists, was moved to write, “now we have just cause to destroy them by all means possible”.  And the English colonists would do exactly that: not always with the blatant violence and brutality of the Spanish conquistadors and encomenderos, but rather by the slow, systematic, and unstoppable encroachment of the native’s lands, driving all tribes that they encountered to the brink of extinction, if not beyond it.  The French experience in the New World, on the other hand, presents a sharp contrast to that of its European rivals, being relatively untainted with the stench of conquest, encroachment, and brutality.  For unlike the English, the Spaniards, and the Portuguese, the French primarily staked their future reward in the New World on trade, rather than conquest or encroachment, and to be successful at trade, they strove to understand, and to respect, their trading partners, the Indians, learning their language, their customs, and their way of life.  Other Europeans of that age would often look upon the French trader with contempt, because of his tendency to “go native”, as they called it, but posterity looks upon him with a much more favorable light.  And in this light, it seems strangely fitting and appropriate that France would give to latter day Americans the Statue of Liberty, that great symbol of hope and freedom which embraces strangers from any land.

There was, of course, another, twin evil in the American colonial experience, to mirror the tragedies that were befalling the native Indian.  This was the enslavement of Africans, a practice begun by the Portuguese in 1444.  Slavery as an institution had existed from the earliest civilizations, and had been practiced in ancient Greece and in the Roman Empire.  And while the early Christians had railed against its worst abuses, they found nothing in their Bible that prohibited its existence as an institution.  In the Middle Ages, slavery had given way to serfdom, but had never entirely disappeared, and now, in the wake of peasant revolts, and the growth of a specialized labor class that could demand higher wages, certain traditional industries searched desperately for an alternative supply of workers.  The Portuguese needed a cheap labor supply to work their farms, and in their coastal explorations of western Africa they found it, capturing or purchasing African natives and transplanting them to Europe.  When the Spanish encomenderos worked their Indian serfs to the point of extinction, it was to this new slave market that they turned, importing Africans to take the place of their own natives.  In the sixteenth century, England joined in the growing slave trade, and a century later would find slaves particularly useful in the developing plantation system in its southern North American colonies.

“Civilized” Europeans, as well as Arab slave-mongers, tried to justify their treatment of black Africans in very creative ways.  Turning to the Old Testament, they identified the African as the descendant of Ham, a son of Noah.  “Cursed be Canaan;” said Noah, in a fit of anger against this son, for seeing his nakedness, “a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”  Canaan was one of Ham’s sons, and blackness, for many latter day readers of this account, was the “mark of Cain” the visible symbol of Noah’s curse against Canaan and his descendants.  A later version of the cause for Noah’s anger would make Ham guilty of violating his father’s rule of chastity imposed upon all family members while on the ark.  Although, according to this legend, Ham had had sex with his own wife, the act still brought Noah’s curse down upon them, manifesting itself in the birth of a black child.  This improvised version of Ham’s sin, with its more explicit sexual element, reflects the new racial prejudices that were forming around the African native.  He was not only less civilized – and by implication less intelligent – than his captors, but he was also sexually dangerous, and even innately evil.  Like the Jew, the African was branded as an outcast in the eyes of white Christian Europeans because of a divine curse, and they were both often portrayed in literature and verse as malevolent.  Even Shakespeare, in his early work, was not above seeing the black man in this demonic light, as in his depiction of the black Moor Aaron in Titus Andronicus.  At one point, the villainous Aaron proudly proclaims, “Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace; Aaron will have his soul black like his face.” 

But there was one white Christian whose name began to surface in the writings of the age, in works of Christopher Marlowe as well as William Shakespeare – a name that would be forever linked with a particularly sinister form of evil.  He became a living symbol of scheming wickedness, and ambition without scruples.  His name was Niccolo Machiavelli.